Vancouver movie magic captures the world

VANCOUVER — In The Twilight Saga: New Moon, Bella Swan goes to David Thompson high school in east Vancouver. In Smallville, the Daily Planet newspaper is located at the art deco Marine Building at Burrard and Hastings. Victoria area’s Hatley Castle is Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Children in the X-Men movies.

British Columbia’s diverse architecture and geography has become a star attraction for the film industry. B.C. can double for most anywhere, from Shanghai to New York to Afghanistan to Forks, Washington.

“We market under ‘A World of Looks,’ because of the diversity of our geography,” explains Gordon Hardwick of the BC Film Commission.

“We have about nine bio-climatic zones — the only thing we really don’t have here is tropical rainforests. That diversity is really what we promote when we’re engaging with our clients.”

This can make for some funny moments; it’s quite amusing watching Jackie Chan zipping across Burrard Inlet on a boat in Rumble in the Bronx. It’s probably the only movie set in New York that features the North Shore Mountains in the background.

Often, though, the direction and editing are so well done you hardly know it’s Vancouver, even if the location has been used in several movies. And some locations are used again and again.

Hatley Castle isn’t just in X-Men, it’s Lex Luthor’s pad in Smallville. The Marine Building also crops up in Fantastic Four, Blade: Trinity and Timecop.

“It’s a very popular location, as is that whole area down there with the towers,” says Hardwick.

“That sells big city pretty well. The Vancouver Art Gallery is another popular location because of the historic courtrooms inside, and the facade on the front.”

Hits and misses

There is a lot of sleight of hand involved, of course.

The Art Gallery was used in the Jodie Foster movie The Accused, but parts were replicated in a studio for easier access.

“A courtroom set was actually constructed to match the window facades from the interior, because they wanted something larger than what was actually in there,” says Hardwick.

“That set was reused over and over again by various productions that came to town. It finally packed it in. It was showing some wear and tear.”

Other locations are one-offs. One of the most expensive movies ever filmed in B.C. was The 13th Warrior, starring Antonio Banderas. Originally titled Eaters of the Dead, it was filmed in 1997, released in 1999, and is rumoured to have cost $160 million,

Unfortunately it only earned $60 million, which propelled it to number five on a list somebody compiled of “the 25 biggest box-office bombs of all time, adjusted for inflation.”

One of the costliest parts of the production was a Viking village constructed for the film at Elk Bay, 45 minutes north of Campbell River on Vancouver Island.

View Map: The top film locations in Hollywood North in a larger mapJoan Miller, of the Vancouver Island North Film Commission, said the film left an estimated $37 million in the Campbell River region, and employed up to 2,200 local people, including extras.

The set was quite detailed — for one day of shooting at Elk Falls, Miller said, crews spent a month building a suspension bridge over the falls, a fake cave entrance, and “bizarre bone — and skull-like huts.”

Today, only a few totems remain from the set.

Another $100-million movie, Brian De Palma’s Mission To Mars, was largely filmed inside the Forum building at the PNE. That’s right, they didn’t really send Tim Robbins to the Red Planet — Mars was a set.

From buildings to streets

The PNE is one of the most popular local filming sites because it offers several buildings and lots of room.

You may recognize the Pacific Coliseum in movies such as Rocky IV and Miracle on Ice. A few years back, Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Ben Affleck all filmed on the PNE grounds on the same day — and managed to not get in a giant rumble, to boot.

Lumber baron Eric Hamber built a beautiful hunting lodge in Minnekhada Regional Park in the 1930s that was used in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse and Smallville.

The 200-hectare park in Coquitlam is largely natural, which is one of the reasons Christine Kilpatrick of On Location Tours likes to take out-of-town film fans there.

“I look forward to seeing the black bears of Minnekhada Park eating the blueberries,” says Kilpatrick, who gives tours of film locations a couple of times per week.

“Jacob Black’s house is in the park as well, from Twilight.”

Kilpatrick can rhyme off all sorts of popular movie locations: White Pine Beach on Buntzen Lake (Twilight: Eclipse, Smallville, Supernatural), the cemetery near the Seymour Demonstration Forest in North Vancouver (“Today they’re filming a TV series for ABC called Once Upon A Time”), and the Paramount Theatre in New Westminster.

“The characters from Twilight: New Moon went to the theatre, and that was the exterior shot,” she relates.

“It’s also been used in the Stargates and the Reese Witherspoon movie This Means War. [But] the inside that they used was the Ridge Theatre [in Vancouver]. So they used the outside [of the Paramount] for one scene, and the inside of the Ridge in the same movie.”

Streets are often turned into movie locations.

Kilpatrick lives in Cloverdale, where Main street was Main street in Smallville. Steveston’s main drag, Moncton street, is often used for filming — it was recently transformed into Storybrooke, Maine, for Once Upon A Time.

Sometimes, entire towns are transformed. In 1997, the historic town of Greenwood in the Interior became Amity Harbour, Wash., for the movie Snow Falling on Cedars.

It was somewhat bizarre, because Amity Harbour was supposed to be a fishing village in the Gulf Islands, while Greenwood is a landlocked old mining town in the Boundary region, just west of Grand Forks.

But there was a connection. Snow Falling On Cedars is set amid the forced relocation of Japanese-Americans from their homes on the West Coast during the Second World War, and Greenwood was one of the places to which Canadian authorities deported Japanese-Canadians at the same time.

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